Social Media

Facebook Co-Founder Is Building a Social Network for Non-Profits [VIDEO]

A few hours after (RED) CEO Susan Smith Ellis kicked off the Mashable & 92Y Social Good Summit by saying that she thought someone needed to create a social network specifically for connecting people to non-profit organizations, Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes took the stage to say he was building it.

Though Hughes, who was also the former director of online organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, said he still can't show off what his new project Jumo actually looks like, he did give the assembled crowd a clear overview of what he's building.

Hughes began by talking about the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake, a disaster he classified as one of "unspeakable proportions." More than 75,000 stories streamed in across news sources in the days and weeks following the earthquake. "The content was horrific, but ultimately galvanizing," said Hughes.

It ultimately led to $1.3 billion raised, with more than $31 million of that amount coming via text message donations. According to Hughes, the disaster demonstrated two things. The first being that people want to help those in need.

More importantly, however, the Haiti earthquake was a clear demonstration of the unsustainable nature of crisis response. In 1989, an earthquake of a similar magnitude hit San Francisco, said Hughes, a city roughly the same size as Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In the 1989 earthquake, 63 people died. In the 2010 earthquake, 230,000 lives were lost. "These people weren't killed by an earthquake," said Hughes, "the earthquake was just the catalyst. They were killed by poverty."

With that idea in mind, Hughes is launching Jumo later this year. Jumo is an attempt to foster more long-term and sustainable relationships between the people and organizations that are working to make a difference, affecting social change on the ground in places like Haiti.

"We feel that it's imperative to make it easy for everyday people... to take action," Hughes said. However, it's currently not easy to connect and follow people on the ground who do this work day in and day out.

Hughes said relationship maps are developing all over the web. Facebook maps relationships between people, Yelp maps relationship between people and local businesses, Amazon maps relationships between people and products. Jumo, which will launch a beta product later this year, will map the relationships between people and non-profit organizations.

To do that, the platform will be broken up into three main components: Find, Follow and Support. First, Jumo will help you find non-profit organizations by learning the types of things that interest you and making suggestions. Second, the site will help you follow those organizations by receiving a stream of updates about the work they're doing and how that work is affecting real people. Hughes said he doesn't expect people to visit Jumo.com every day, but will instead offer the stream to people wherever they are, be that email, Facebook, mobile or elsewhere.

Finally, Jumo will help people support the organizations with which they've built a relationship. Hughes thinks that the call for support should come only after people and organizations have built that connection with one another. All too often, said Hughes, the donate button on websites is big, flashy, and colorful, and email calls to action are usually in all caps, starting with the word "Urgent!" Hughes hopes that Jumo will move organizations toward a new era where relationships are forged and cultivated before calls to action.

Check out Hughes' presentation from the Social Good Summit below and let us know what you think of the concept of Jumo in the comments below.

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is a leading source for news, information and resources for the Connected Generation. Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world. Mashable's record 42 million unique visitors worldwide and 21 million social media followers are one of the most influential and engaged online communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.